Wrapping it up

Its been a while since my last blog but I've been really busy trying to finish up projects for other classes. I switched my focus from documenting the code to creating a presentation for the project. James and Ashley are rounding up all of our contributions and combining the work. Then they are gonna send a pull request to add our work to the OpenKinect project. I think that we are going to have a solid presentation at the end of the semester, but only the future can tell.

slow and steady wins the race... hopefully

Last time our whole group met together we decided it was time to start preparing a little for our end of the semester presentation. We also tried to clarify what exactly we meant when we talked about documenting the project. We decided to try to document a huge file called cameras.c because it is in the worst condition. The code is about 800 lines long and id say there is only a dozen or so comments that are actually meaningful. Thursday a few of us were able to document a few functions and write down questions for a bunch of functions. So the plan today is hopefully James won't be plagued with another unfortunate event that prevents him from coming to school and we will be able to collaborate and knock out a some more functions. If we stay on this course I think we will be able to meet our documenting goals and I have full faith in the other members to finish their implementation of the auto-exposure and maybe some other features.

Free open source gaming and documentation

After going to POSSCON, which I had a great time at, I went home and looked into some free open source games. Before this conference I didn't even know that there were open source games, especially  ones that you can contribute to. I found a HUGE list on wiki of open source games and thought I would share a few of them. One that I found really interesting is Gang Garrison 2, which is a 2d version of the game Team Fortress 2. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find the source code for this game so I looked around for another interesting game, but one that had the source code easily available. I soon found one called FreeSpace 2 . I know that I don't have a lot of time right now to spend working on a game that isn't school related but I plan on finding/contributing to a game this summer when I have a lot more free time. I went to some other talks at POSSCON, like one about security by Chris Hinkley, another talk I attended was about encouraging Open Source in education by Corey Donohoe. They were very interesting but I can't really do too much with the information that was passed along. The Open Source gaming talk was just right down my alley.


Now on to school related topics.... I've spent some time with one of my group members (Tony) talking about what we need to try to document in the source code. The code isn't really organized at all and there are limited to no comments so we have our work cut out for us, but I really want to be able to submit something that they think is valuable.
 

POSSCON!

So when looking at the schedule of POSSCON I have realized how excited I am to go! I had no idea that there were gonna be talks on gaming. There is also a workshop on open source gaming and all aspects of it. This is perfect for me because getting involved in this should help me when applying to a game company. The speaker for the seminar and workshop is John Diamond. The other talk that I am really interested in is the one about open source trends in the government. I'm still working on some questions for the speakers but I can't wait to talk to John Diamond and flood him with some questions.

Back to the grind....

Well I had a nice break from school the past week. With saying that I really haven't worked much on our project because I was out of town, but I did respond to an email about POSSCON so I wouldn't lose my spot. I also met with one of my group mates and we talked about doing some documentation for the project because we are still learning C from our other teammates. Hopefully the documenting will also help us understand a little more of what the code is doing.

Not too far behind

One of our assignments for our project (openKinect), we were supposed to find a bug and fix it. There weren't really any bugs so we tried to implement a feature request.  I don't really know how to write a function that writes to a register and their write register function wasn't working for what we need it for so James has been working on a new one that we can use. I was getting worried about keeping up with our assignments for our class but there was another feature request that Ashley discovered. It is way easier to implement so after looking at his new functions, I am getting a better idea of what we need to do for the other feature request. And I think our time line gives us a good basic idea of what pace we need to be working at. Now the fun part with TOSS ch 8 is going to be writing a biography without talking and/or writing it ourselves.

And the lightbulb goes off

    So yesterday I was finally able to download all the requirements for OpenKinect. Its been a painfully slow process of making space then downloading then making space and so on. Anyway I was able to use James' Kinect on my mac. It worked for a little bit but of course it froze my computer after it had been losing too many packets of information. Anyway James and I spend some time on looking at the code and while looking at it a light bulb went off. Even though it was kind of a small one, id say about 5 watts, it was still a new discovery. We found the register that is dealing with the exposure and the value to turn off the automatic feature. Also there is a function that allows you to input a value to a certain register. This is a nice discovery even though it doesn't solve our problem it is a step in the right direction because I think we might be able to edit that function to help us with our problem.

     I also did our assignment for TOSS chapter 7, which had to do with applying a patch. A really useful command is diff -u. This puts the differences into a patch format so it is easier to read what the differences are. Hopefully we will be able to put this skill to use soon but while talking to my group we realized that we might have to write a new driver and I have no experience in that. But I can't wait to learn how to!